De Novo Genome assembly of the Caucasian dwarf goby Knipowitschia cf. caucasica , a new alien Gobiidae invading the River Rhine

The Caucasian dwarf goby Knipowitschia cf. caucasica is a new invasive alien Gobiidae spreading in the Lower Rhine since 2019. Little is known about the invasion biology of the species and further investigations to reconstruct the invasion history are lacking genomic resources. We assembled a high-quality chromosome-scale reference genome of Knipowitschia cf. caucasica by combining PacBio, Omni-C and Illumina technologies. The size of the assembled genome is 956.58 Mb with a N50 scaffold length of 43 Mb, which includes 92.3 % complete vertebrate/Actinopterygii Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs. 98.96 % of the assembly sequence was assigned to 23 chromosome-level scaffolds, with a GC-content of 42.83 %. Repetitive elements account for 53.08 % of the genome. The chromosome-level genome contained 49,622 transcripts with 42,926 multi-exons, of which 45,512 genes were functionally annotated. In summary, the high-quality genome assembly provides a fundamental basis to understand the adaptive advantage of the species.